CVE-2026-42876: External Secrets Operator reads information from a third-party service and automatically injects the values as Kubernetes Secrets. Prior to 2.4.1, a user who…

PriorityP425medium4.9CVSS 3.1

AVNACHPRLUINSCCLILAN

EPSS

0.21%

11.8th percentile

External Secrets Operator reads information from a third-party service and automatically injects the values as Kubernetes Secrets. Prior to 2.4.1, a user who only has permission to create ExternalSecret resources can cause the operator to create a Secret that Kubernetes will automatically populate with a long-lived token for the specified service account. This effectively allows the user to impersonate any service account in the namespace without needing direct create permissions on TokenRequest or Secrets of that type. This vulnerability is fixed in 2.4.1.

Affected

2 ranges

Vendor	Product	Version range	Fixed in
external-secrets	external-secrets	< 2.4.1	2.4.1
github.com	external-secrets_external-secrets_apis	>= 0.1.0 < 2.4.1	2.4.1

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